In many businesses, including the auto industry, there is a lack of seamless integration between the sales process and the finance process. Auto dealers, for example, use a multitude of Internet lead generation companies such as Autotrader, Cars.com, Autobytel, etc., to showcase their inventory, build brand awareness, and attract online customers. Simultaneously, these on-line portals feature loan-financing ads from direct-to-consumer lenders such as LendingTree® that compete for finance revenue with many auto dealers whose website finance link is an email lead sent to the auto dealer's Internet manager. In this regard, the absence of an on-line lending solution for those websites is a detriment to the auto dealer's profits.
Transacting the right type of automotive finance with the right customer has traditionally been a challenge for all parties (dealer, lender, and customer) involved in the transaction. For example, auto dealers sort through showroom and web based leads that are rarely financially pre-qualified and spend valuable time dealing with customers on vehicles that don't match their credit profile. In addition, the auto dealer's finance and insurance (F&I) process must continually stay abreast of new and ever changing programs offered from lenders; the best source to place a loan contract this week may not be the same as the previous week. Lenders struggle to obtain credit applications that meet their lending criteria while avoiding those applications that will be declined, and customers' knowledge of lending products on the market is limited and they look for new ways to obtain more details about loan programs than just the loan rate.
While the advent of the Internet has spawned new attempts to improve the consumer's experience of the loan process, first generation website approaches focused on a limited number of loan products and applied outdated loan process business models to the Internet. These first generation websites failed to fulfill the needs of today's broad spectrum of on-line consumers.
Accordingly, there is market demand for an infrastructure technology platform that creates efficiencies in the marketplace, reduces cost, and increases revenue while building goodwill with customers, clients, and partners. In this regard, it is desirable to provide a method and apparatus that provides a gateway between the sales process and the finance process that is able to capture vehicle purchases from lead generators, while allowing on-line customers to obtain pre-approved automotive financing on dealer websites before they reach the showroom.